Limit, The (24 page)

When they reached the hospital, a doctor told Louise that her father was on the phone from New York. He had learned of the accident from a UN contact. He wanted to be the one to tell his daughter that Collins had died in the helicopter.

When the awful fact had sunk in she asked to see him. “I wanted to see Peter but everybody said no, you don't want to do that.” She insisted. A receptionist took them down to a basement morgue. Louise could see a bluish-white foot sticking out from under a white sheet. “I said that's enough. I knew Peter was gone,” she said. “I'm glad I turned around then.” They had been married for eighteen months.

Hawthorn also asked to see the body when he arrived at the hospital. “The doctor pulled back the sheet,” Tavoni said, “and there was Peter, like he was asleep. Mike took one look, turned and went out into the corridor and slid down to the floor. He just sat there, saying nothing.”

Back at the Nürburgring, Brooks had won, but nobody celebrated. Ten or so drivers and friends gathered in a hotel room at the Sporthotel to await word on Collins' condition. There
was subdued talk interrupted by bursts of anxious laughter. Denise McCluggage cut Bonnier's hair. It was, McCluggage later wrote, “an understood but unacknowledged waiting.” They expected the worst, but it was still a shock when the news came. “I do remember sitting on my bed that night,” she later wrote, “holding in my hand the one shoe I had just removed, and then finding myself exactly like that 45 minutes later, stiff and bone chilled.”

The Pflanzgarten was not a particularly dangerous curve, and Collins was known as a safe driver. Had the continuing pressure to redeem himself caused him to exceed the limit in his pursuit of Brooks, or was it a simple mechanical failure?

German authorities concluded that driving error caused the crash, but Hill suspected the brakes gave out. Ferrari was so obsessed with building powerful engines that other components were often discounted. As every Ferrari driver knew, the outdated drum brakes had a tendency to wear out, or “fade,” as the drivers termed it. As friction heated the saucer-shaped drums they expanded and edged away from a corresponding piece known as the brake shoe. The driver consequently had to stomp successively harder on the brake pedal to bring drum and shoe together.

It didn't take long for the brakes to lose their bite altogether. Von Trips had pulled in with fading brakes after just two laps. The mechanics threw up their hands. He managed to finish fourth by downshifting as he approached each turn, using the braking power of the engine itself to slow the car. He went ten laps without touching his brake pedal at all.

Hill's brakes also died, causing a near accident at the steep descent to the Adenau Bridge. “I had to throw the car sideways
and slide it through,” Hill said, “and from then on I was finished. I had no brakes.”

Five days after Collins died, Horst Peets, one of Germany's most prominent sports commentators, published an article headlined “Peter Collins: For What?” in
Die Welt
, a leading newspaper. It was once accepted that advances in race technology directly contributed to safer, better-engineered cars for the public. By the late 1950s, Peets argued, the improvements no longer justified the deaths:

A number of motor sport experts—mostly men who are in offices, or men who represent a particular sphere of this industry—make it sound like horsepower and cylinder pressure go together with death on the racetrack the way a collar-button fastens to the collar. They take this kind of death as a function: someone must be ready to die in order for us to live a little bit better. . . . Collins was a fine young man, as are basically all his peers. We should convince them, however, that there are quiet things that make chivalry and manhood.

In the 1930s the great Italian driver Tazio Nuvolari, known as the Flying Mantuan, said that “death will catch us all.” Since then, Peets wrote, “almost every big-time driver, young or old, has died in one gruesome way or another. Something drove each man up to that diabolical point where he finally overestimated himself.”

Four days later Peets followed up with an appeal for safer, stronger cars: “This is not a sport but a show, where you wait
see who dies. . . So vulnerable and exposed is the driver, so helpless in the moment where something goes wrong, so incredibly naked in the whirlpool of death.”

He quoted from a letter Countess von Trips had sent him in response to his first article: “I hope that your article helps me to get my son to quit this cruel sport.”

It would take more than a pair of newspaper columns to dissuade von Trips. Two weeks later he rebutted Peets in a letter to
Bild
, a popular German tabloid, arguing that even in the modern world physical courage was an important virtue and a corrective for a culture grown soft on suburbs, television, frozen food, and other postwar comforts. He espoused a Nietzschean view of racing as an expression of man's drive to excel, even if it cost a driver's life. The editors splashed his letter across eight columns below the headline “Therefore I Must Race On!”:

That we race cannot be explained by the necessity of sports for industry, but by the indefinite urge in men to compete and succeed in doing perilous things. Things that really serve no purpose, but still require the entire dedication and force of his personality. . . Danger and fear have become anonymous and invisible—radioactive clouds floating around us. That doesn't change the fact that there are people who thirst for action, to overcome risk and danger by force of will, who are born to fight. These are the characteristics of the man who will help build our contemporary worldview.

A few days after this public exchange, Louise Collins returned to Modena to sort out her affairs. She stopped to see Ferrari, as
widows often did. Speaking through an interpreter, he told her that Collins had been like a son to him. He could not continue the racing program without him, he said. The Italian Grand Prix on September 7, 1958, would be the last race for Ferrari. After that,
finito
. He never attended the races, as she knew, but he would join her for this one last race if she would accompany him.

Ferrari and Louise together visited Hill, who was being treated for a kidney ailment in a Milan hospital. “Ferrari wept at my bedside,” Hill recalled years later. “He told me he was going to watch the race and that Louise would be by his side. It all sounded very melodramatic and I used to believe—and tell people—that he faked it all. Now I don't think he did. I think it was a sort of drama he created in his mind and believed it.”

Whatever Ferrari believed, he failed to show up at Monza, leaving Louise to attend the race alone. Years later she would see his absence as a benign form of manipulation, Ferrari's way of thrusting her back among old friends one last time before she resumed her acting career. Seated in the grandstand for the first time since Collins died, Louise watched as Mike Hawthorn, her husband's “mon ami mate,” lined up on the front row of the starting grid, the lone Ferrari among three Vanwalls. As always, he was wearing a bow tie and green jacket. But he was not the same person. Collins' death had erased Hawthorn's schoolboy smirk. In the weeks before the race he had sat with friends weeping and broken.

At noon on race day he had languished in bed at the Palace Hotel in Milan, trying to pull himself together for the midafternoon start. He and Collins had made a pact that if one died the other would keep racing. In honor of their agreement he squeezed himself into the car. He may also have been
encouraged to return by his position in the Grand Prix standings. If he could hold off Moss he would win the championship.

Von Trips and Hill lined up in the second row with orders to protect Hawthorn. With Collins gone and Hawthorn shaken, it was becoming clear that they would inherit the Ferrari mantle, but for now they played supporting roles.

Hill exploded out of the start to an early lead—the first time an American had led a Grand Prix race. His maneuver was a deliberate provocation to Moss, who had a tendency to run his cars down with aggressive starts. The rabbit act worked: Moss flashed ahead to ride Hill's tailpipe and withdrew seventeen laps later with a busted gearbox. His departure left the way open for Hawthorn to finish second, giving him an edge over Moss in the season tally. Meanwhile von Trips had tried to power his way to the fore in a car muscled up with a robust new engine but he didn't last a lap. As the lead pack rumbled down the opening stretch at 125 mph, von Trips drifted to the left looking for a way to pass the green Vanwall driven by Tony Brooks before they braked and swung right into a bend known as the Lesmo Curve. “The Vanwalls are built really high,” von Trips wrote in his diary. “So beside me was a really high green wall. We were barely centimeters apart.”

Von Trips slid safely ahead of Brooks, only to collide with Harry Schell, who was passing Brooks on the other side. “Schell passed the Vanwall, lost control in the curve on the left side and I immediately started going up his backside,” von Trips wrote. While Brooks followed the Lesmo curve to the right, Schell and von Trips skittered off the left side of the track, their cars locked together. As they slid into the underbrush Schell looked
over, aghast that von Trips had rammed him. “Von Trips must have been totally crazy,” he later said.

Schell was unhurt, but von Trips flew from his car and landed in a rose bush. “I felt something like a funny bone in my left calf. I couldn't see the car but it couldn't be far. Because I wouldn't be able to save myself if there was a tank explosion, I yelled. Then a paramedic pulled me out of the rose bush.”

The “funny bone” turned out to be a severely torn and stretched knee cartilage. His car didn't fare much better: its chassis had snapped in two. Von Trips spent two months in hospital, first in Milan and then Cologne. For the second time in as many years he faced a long and complicated convalescence, relieved by teasing from friends. “What are you thinking?” a former schoolmate wrote from Berlin. “A car is not a tank or a snowplow. It is intended strictly for roads and not for test drives through ditches and trees!”

While lying in the hospital he wrote a long soul-searching letter to an old girlfriend in Munich revealing loneliness and self-doubt. He confessed that he had begun to question whether his campaign for a championship was worth the isolation and emotional sacrifice. Almost none of the drivers had a family life, and he understood why. Racing made it almost impossible to cultivate real relationships. She wrote back to say that he must accept that he was human, and not a superman:

You have the ability to love already in you—it's only, I believe, that over time you have simply forgotten how to analyze those feelings properly. And so you have misled people. I'll bet there are women who complain of
insensitivity and coldness in you, women who have wanted or hoped for things you could not give them, because your whole self, your whole life, your yearning and suffering under your motto and creed can tolerate no rival. The racers—you are in some place obsessed, and that is not good, because you sacrifice too much, you are too much fixed on one thing.

She went on to congratulate him for growing beyond what she called his “lovable recklessness”:

In you there is already a little of the maturity, the detached observation that only very old people have. It is probably because you have looked death in the eye so often that you are already finished with your life! . . . Wolfgang—I am very pleased with you. You have become much more mature, and even if the lovable recklessness is gone—so are you dearer to me. I have never believed the frivolity of which many accuse you.

Von Trips was recovering at Burg Hemmersbach when word arrived that Ferrari had dropped him. After a total of eight accidents, Ferrari's patience had run out. “I'm not amused by drivers who smash up my cars,” Ferrari told a reporter. “I expect them to win.”

If he were to race again, von Trips would have to recuperate yet again and find a team willing to take a chance on him. Prostrated in his castle bedroom, he was unsure if he had the stomach for another comeback. From his window he could see the seasonal workers turning the loam in well-tended fields. In
the hothouse his carnations pushed up through rich Rhineland soil. At 5 a.m. each morning a truck ferried the flowers to a wholesale market twenty-five miles north of Cologne. His pet project, a newly planted cherry orchard, yielded fruit sold to local bakeries. After thousands of hard miles of racing he could succumb contentedly enough to the unhurried rhythms of planting. It was hard for him to know if he had at last accepted the farmlands as his rightful place, or if he had given up on racing the way a drowning man accepts his fate.